Storage in the form of hard disks is now required in a range of consumer devices from networking devices such as residential gateways to media products such as digital video recorders (DVRs) and media players. In many instances, such as in a residential gateway, for example, storage may be a desirable option, though for reasons of cost, the unit would need to be shipped without it, with a potential option to be added on later. Today, this would be done with an external drive such as a Universal Serial Bus (USB) drive, though this option has performance limitations and requires a separate unit and possibly a cable to connect the drive. An additional issue is how the unit could later support more sophisticated storage (such as a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)). Further, adding additional functionality, such as storage, internal to a consumer device, may create operational issues, such as excessive heat generation.
Therefore, a need exists for techniques for transforming or configuring enclosures of consumer devices to enable modular units to be attached to increase functionality, such as storage capacity, by the addition of modules, without compromising the integrity of the overall structure and performance, including the industrial design integrity.